My employer makes a nifty little 12-volt LED light that contains separate RGB (red/green/blue) diodes. It’s 3/4-inch in diameter and intended for rugged, outdoor environments — specifically decorative use on carnival rides. The cool thing is that it can change color on command. It has four separate wires — one power plus three separate ground leads — so that the three colors are independently controllable. The result is that the unit can display the eight colors of the 3-Bit RGB palette by powering the diodes alone and in combination.

I began thinking about taking the technology for driving LED matrices and scaling it up to use this light. I thought an LED monitor of sorts made from the company’s products might be an intersting promotional tool, such as at trade shows. The larger lens size and greater viewing angle would make it more akin to an incandescent scoreboard than a desktop circuit board. That would be fairly well suited to scoreboard-style scrolling text and simple animations, but what if you want to display video?

Those were the glory days. RealAudio had just broken the barrier on real-time sound streaming, video was still a pipe dream, IRC was the interactive communications system of choice, Usenet brought piracy into the new age and Hotline turned it into a community, and Sir […]